In the Flesh and Other Tales of The Biotech Revolution [SSC]

by Brian Stableford

  Martha reached back up to the cupboard to get the chocolate digestives.

  “I’ve done all that,” she said, witheringly. “He isn’t going to go. He’s wearing dark glasses.” She realized as she said it that it sounded ridiculous, as if dark glasses were the mark of a race apart—a race that couldn’t be subjected to the pressures of everyday etiquette. Except, of course, that it wasn’t as ridiculous as it sounded, because people who wore dark glasses for the reason that Carl Ulick was wearing dark glasses really were a race apart, and because her own daughter was a member of that race apart, and because that really did mean that the pressure of everyday etiquette wasn’t adequate to get the boy out of the house and away before Geoff got home.

  Martha took advantage of deep-thought-pause number two to agitate the water in the cups and press the bags against the sides to make them yield up their treasure.

  “She invited him, you say?” Geoff asked. It wasn’t so much a comment, more a punctuation mark to signal that he was still thinking hard.

  “So he says,” Martha agreed, unable to stop herself from adding: “She would, wouldn’t she? Not tell us, I mean.”

  “It’s okay,” Geoff said. “Maybe. No need for...well, what I mean is, maybe we should just accept it as normal. I mean, it is her birthday and she is sixteen, and...well, hell, just wait till I get there, okay. Don’t do anything. Just hang on. It’s no big deal.”

  Martha hoped that he could perform better than that in the office. If he couldn’t, people must fall about laughing every time he launched himself into one of his pregnant pauses. On the other hand, if he could perform better than that in the office he wouldn’t still be in the office. Anyone who was anyone these days used a home-based workstation. The only people who still set out every weekday morning to run the gauntlet of the M4 were salesmen, delivery boys and people too stupid to get fully to grips with the new technology.

  It’s all right for people like Carl Ulick, she thought. Born blind and probably born deaf too, he’s still a child of the twenty-first century. He grew up with it all, when it wasn‘t just his visual cortex that was nice and pliable, ready to adapt. I was born in 1980 and never laid a finger on a keyboard until I was in Miss James’s class, by which time I was a fully-fledged technophobe. Geoff’s five years older than me, and never got closer to IT than his play station. We‘re dinosaurs. Jenny’s may be the last generation to suffer what she’s suffering, but we‘re the last generation to suffer what we‘re suffering. All wrecks together.

  “Thanks a bunch,” she said aloud, as Geoff bid her goodbye without giving her time to formulate a proper reply, pretending that he had to put the mobile down and get stuck into some serious driving. She knew that the phrase had been out of date since she was a child, but it was still stuck in her mind, still likely to come through in her private thoughts, because her brain simply wasn’t adaptable enough to discard it.

  Martha hung up the receiver and fished the teabags out of the cups. She put the saucers on the tray with the milk jug and the sugar-bowl, then placed the cups carefully upon the saucers. Then, fully armed for the fray, she set off for the living-room, wishing she had married someone with more sense and better genes—and regretting, even more, that she hadn’t been born with more sense and better genes herself.

  * * * *

  “I was just icing Jennifer’s birthday cake when you rang the doorbell,” Martha told Carl Ulick, making the point that Jennifer did have birthdays, and parents who cared about them—parents who made an effort, in spite of the fact that they hadn’t actually bought her a present this year. There was no way of knowing what Jennifer might have told the boy, but he could see for himself how things were, how neat and normal the house was, how decently aproned and ever-dutiful Martha was.

  “Don’t let me keep you,” the boy said. “I’ll be okay.”

  Martha wanted to take advantage of the invitation to retreat but she didn’t dare. If she’d gone back into the kitchen she’d have been safe from conversation, but not from embarrassment. The problem was that he would be okay, that in a sense he wouldn’t even be here. His body would be sitting patiently on the sofa but his eyes would be looking out upon some other world entirely—a world that was exclusive to him and his kind: the empire of the blind. He had been helping Jennifer to find her way within it, to make the journey that was far more difficult for her because her visual cortex had become set in its ways while she could still see out of her own eyes.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “It won’t take a minute, once Geoff s home. He’s stuck on the motorway. An accident.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, probably referring to the accident rather than Geoff being stuck.

  “The roads don’t get any better,” she said. “Ever since I was your age they’ve been saying that the day of the commuter is dead, but it doesn’t seem to make a jot of difference how many people work from home. It’s partly the airport, of course. We signed a petition against the sixth terminal, but no one ever takes any notice of petitions.” The more she talked the easier it became. Now that she was sitting down, sipping tea, she felt much more at home, almost in control of herself, if not the situation.

  “May I take these off?” the boy asked, as if he’d read her thought and knew exactly how to throw a spanner in the works. He meant the glasses, of course.

  She barely hesitated. “Of course,” she said. After all, she saw Jennifer’s eyes every day. Jennifer never wore dark glasses.

  The boy removed the shades, folded them up and tucked them away in the breast pocket of his jacket. It was a good jacket—must have cost at least four hundred, with a quality label.

  Carl Ulick’s eyes were blue. It was a discreet blue, though, not the kind of day-glo blue that the kind of people who used contact lenses as fashion accessories went in for. It was easy enough to see, if you looked hard, that the eyes were false, but they weren’t obtrusively false. All the miraculously-compacted electronic bits were tucked away inside. Martha didn’t have a clue what any of that stuff actually looked like, or how any of it worked; she still had to think in terms of miniature computers and miniature radio stations, as if Jennifer’s eyes were lumber rooms packed tight with tiny screens and keyboards, with tiny cinema projectors to project the virtual displays on to the retina.

  “How long have you known Jennifer?” Martha asked, trying to make it seem like the perfectly natural question that it was.

  “Three years,” he told her. “She posted a notice asking for advice—about training the cortex, that is. She needed moral support. I couldn’t tell her anything the doctors hadn’t, but it makes a difference if it’s coming from the inside. The doctors know the theory, but they don’t know how it feels. Only people who actually use their eyes really know what’s involved in learning to see.”

  Martha felt a stab of guilt when he said that. Of course Jennifer couldn’t get adequate moral support from her parents. Of course she had to go to the Net in search of fellow citizens of the New Self. Of course she never told her parents who she was talking to, or what about, or to what effect. Why waste time blink-blink-blinking at your parents when you could be talking to somebody real? Why bother to tell them you’ve invited some smart kid to your birthday party, to see that the stupid icing on your futile cake is all over the bloody place?

  “I suppose the time will come when we’ll rip out the eyes of new-born babies as a matter of routine,” Martha said, deliberately treading on dangerous ground. “Why leave them with a handicap when it’s so easy to train their visual cortex to use supersight? In a hundred years time, people like me will be freaks. And it won’t just be eyes, will it? By then, it will be whole bodies. Maybe they’ll just take out the babies’ brains and put them into different flesh, better in every imaginable way than the stuff mere genes provide. On the other hand, maybe there’ll be super-intelligent brains made out of silicon chips, so that we won’t need the babies at all.”

  The trouble with dangerous ground, she thought,
as she lowered her eyes to avoid his accusative stare, is that it’s always downhill every step of the way.

  “I don’t think that’s the right way to think about it,” Carl Ulick opined, his fluty voice as mild as milk. “In my case, it really was a case of replacement. My eyes and ears didn’t work, so the doctors took them out and gave me ones that did—ones that had extra abilities. When they’re dealing with people whose eyes do work, they don’t think in terms of replacement. They think in terms of augmentation.”

  Martha didn’t want an argument, especially today. It was Friday the thirteenth, after all. Jennifer was sixteen. Sweet sixteen and never been kissed, except perhaps in virtual reality. In virtual reality, she might have done anything—except, of course, that her visual cortex was still having trouble with adaptation. She could look out into cyberspace, live within the Net far more comfortably and far more fully than she’d ever be able to live in the world of her parents, but she was still half-blind there because her brain was too set in its ways. Even in the empire of the blind, she was still a cripple of sorts—and this was the guide dog who had come to her aid: the sighted man who was a king in the country of the exiles, the country beyond the borders of reality. Maybe Jennifer hadn’t had sex even on the Net. Maybe she was still a stranger, and afraid, in the land she never made.

  I ought to know! Martha thought. She ought to tell me. I’m her mother, after all. I don’t even know if she hates me for not having better genes, or the benefit of genetic counseling, or for having eyes that see after their own stupid fashion.

  “I’m sure they do,” she said, in answer to Carl Ulick’s little homily. “And I’m sure you’re right about the proper way to think about it. I’m really very glad that Jennifer has been able to use her eyes, and that there are people out there who can help her. It’s just...so difficult to understand. She doesn’t talk to us much, you see. Now that she’d found a world where she can function so much better, she doesn’t like to come back to ours. But she’s still in ours, day in and day out.” The truth is in the flesh, she added, silently.

  “It must be very difficult for you,” the boy conceded, graciously. “It was difficult for my parents, at first. I anchored them down for a long time, and when I wasn’t a burden any more...well, as you say, it’s as if I stepped into a world of my own, where they couldn’t follow. I couldn’t explain it to them—how it felt to be permanently tuned in to the Net, with access to every printed page and every visual image stored there. I did try, but it wasn’t so hard for me. Once the implants in my ears were working it was easy to learn to talk and I was so glad of it I babbled all the time about anything and everything. It’s not so easy for Jennifer. For her, it’s far easier to talk to me, or anyone else wired into the Net, than it is to talk to you. You mustn’t think that it’s because she doesn’t want to. I’m sure she loves you very much, and I’m sure she’s very grateful for everything you do for her.”

  “I know that,” Martha assured him, dishonestly. “How much, exactly, do you know about Jennifer’s condition?”

  “I don’t know much about medical science or molecular genetics,” Carl Ulick told her, although she couldn’t tell whether he was missing the point on purpose. “The technical terminology’s beyond me. All I know, really, is that her motor nerves don’t work and that the condition is still deteriorating. I gather that she’s almost entirely paralyzed. She told me that she needed the new eyes even if she never learned to see properly, because her eyelids were the only part of herself she still had enough control over to use—instead of fingers, that is. Sorry, I didn’t put that very well—what I mean is....”

  “It’s all right,” Martha told him, brusquely. “I know exactly what you mean.” After a moment’s hesitation, while she wondered why she didn’t feel relieved that she didn’t have to protect any lies that Jennifer had told, she continued: “She used to be able to use her fingers, you know—just a bit, for a while. Then, after they gave up on the speech therapy, they fitted a keypad gizmo to her mouth so that she could pick out the letters with her tongue—but the disease is degenerative, you see. It just gets worse and worse.”

  “I know,” the boy said. “She told me. I can’t follow all the jargon, but she can.”

  Martha felt tears welling up then. For some reason, the thought that Jennifer understood what was happening to her—that the fancy eyes which has allowed her to look directly into the information-world of the Net had allowed her to read and inwardly digest every single research paper ever written about her condition—always seemed to add that extra turn of the screw to the tragedy itself.

  Taking a defensive sip of tea, Martha tried to blink the tears way. She was determined not to make a show of herself by reaching up to dab at her eyes while the boy was watching her. “Why did you come here,” she whispered. Her confusion had made it impossible for her to hold the question back any longer.

  Carl Ulick paused, but it wasn’t one of Geoff’s theatrical pauses. The boy really was thinking. Eventually, he said: “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you, but it was Jennifer I came to see. I just wanted to give her a birthday present—and she wanted me to come. If you’d just let me see her for a few minutes...it really will be all right.”

  He’s right, of course, Martha thought, still fighting back the tears. I’m the one who‘s being stupid. I’m the one who’s being blind. I’m the one who doesn’t understand. Of course she’s told him everything. Of course she wanted him to come. Of course she wouldn’t think it worth her while to try explaining it to us, blinking and blinking and blinking and knowing all the while that she wasn’t getting through....

  Outside, in the road, she heard a car door bang. All banging car doors sounded alike, but she knew that this particular bang was Geoff’s. He’d been within sight of the men in yellow jackets, after all, and on the other side of the accident the road must have been beautifully clear. He’d probably had the accelerator flat to the boards ever since, and now he was here to complicate matters—after they’d only just been simplified.

  She heard the sound of a key in the front door, and then she heard the door open and close. It didn’t bang; no matter what kind of noise he made in the street Geoff always came into the house on tiptoe, out of respect for his daughter’s condition.

  “That’s my husband,” she said, wishing that she didn’t sound— or look—so utterly foolish.

  * * * *

  “It’s very kind of you to come all this way,” Geoff said to Carl Ulick, “but I really don’t think that Jennifer should have asked you without telling us.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” the boy replied, doggedly, “but she is expecting me, and I can’t see that there’s a problem. I just want to give her a present.”

  Martha waited by the door. She knew that she ought to go into the kitchen and finish icing the birthday cake, but she also knew that she might be needed here. She now regretted the instinct that had sent her scurrying for the phone, anxious to turn the problem over to Geoff so that he could sort it out. It was an instinct that was utterly reliable where dripping taps and defective light-switches were concerned, but now that she thought back on all the Jennifer problems she had automatically turned over to Geoff she wasn’t so sure that he had ever been the best person to handle them.

  “The thing is,” Geoff said, depositing his briefcase in the gap between the TV and the rubber-plant, exactly as he always did, “that I’m not sure you understand the situation here. Jennifer’s a very sick girl. She doesn’t have visitors, apart from the doctors. I suppose she can communicate with you—and other people like you—fairly readily, in spite of the problems she’s had adapting to her new eyes, but she isn’t nearly so good at coping with face-to-face communication. I don’t think you understand the kind of pressure you’d be putting her under by coming here in person to see her in the flesh. I can understand why she might have thought that it was a nice idea, but I’m certain she hasn’t thought it through. It’s very kind of you, as I said, and we’ll be
only too glad to pass your present on to Jennifer, but we have to be very careful. I really don’t think....”

  Martha could see that Carl Ulick was becoming slightly annoyed. She was becoming rather annoyed herself—and that was unusual, because Geoff s speeches usually washed over her like steady rain, gradually wearing her down without ever raising the slightest hint of anger or resistance. She was afraid that the boy might say something that would make things worse, so she stepped in before he could.

  “Would it really do any harm, Geoff?” she said. “Maybe if he just looked in....”

  Geoff turned on her in frank astonishment, raising his eyebrows as if to say: Is this what I rushed home for? Did I come hell for leather in answer to your hysterical call, only to find that you’ve gone over to the enemy?

  “I think it might do some harm,” Geoff said, as if anyone but a complete idiot would have been able to understand his concern and support his stance. “I don’t think this young man understands....”

  “Actually, Mr. Mortimore,” said Carl Ulick, doing exactly what Martha had been afraid he’d do, “I think it might be you who doesn’t understand.”

  Geoff s pause was the mother of all pauses. For the first time in her life, Martha understood what people meant when they said that there were times when you could hear a pin drop. She felt that she could have watched the pin in question fall, in slow motion close-up, even though she only had the eyes that nature had given her.